Joi Ito has an interesting riff on issues of identity in the networked world. Here’s an excerpt:

My point is. We should have different ID’s for our different roles. Each of these ID’s will have a different bit of authentication and collateral attached to it.

If you deconstruct the different types of ID (got this from Eric Hughes) you get 4 basic types. Your physical ID (doctors knows this best), your network ID (phone number or IP address), financial ID (your bank has this info), and your legal id (government, school. IE are you married? A citizen? A graduate?) Different transactions require different attributes. If you’re getting married, you probably care most about whether they are married to someone else. If you’re doing a financial transaction, you are probably most concerned about whether they can cover their end of the transaction. If you are trying to identify a blogger, you probably care if they are the owner of the URL. You don’t care if my real name is Joi Ito or where I live exactly. As a blog reader, you probably care if it is the same blogger that has posted all of the other blog entries on this blog.